Scrolling and hyperlinks: The effects of two prevalent digital features on children's digital reading comprehension

Background This study examined how children's ability to understand what they read on screens is impacted by two specific digital features: hovering hyperlinks and scrolling. Methods The participants were 75 English‐speaking children ( M = 9.90 years, SD = 0.90 years) in Grades 3 to 5 who participated in an online research study. Using a within‐participants design, children read standardised passages from the Gates–MacGinitie Reading Tests (MacGinitie et al., 2000) and answered multiple‐choice comprehension questions. In one condition, passages were presented without digital features referred to as the clicking condition; in another, children had to scroll to navigate through the passages, in a third, there were hyperlinks that provided a word definition when a participant hovered their cursor over a blue and underlined word, and a final condition included both scrolling and hyperlinks. Results As expected, there was a significant main effect of grade on children's ability to understand what they read, with better performance for children in Grade 5 than 3. Critically, there was a significant main effect of condition on children's performance on the reading comprehension questions, with higher scores for the condition with no digital features compared with the conditions with hovering hyperlinks and both scrolling and hovering hyperlinks. Performance was similar between the clicking and scrolling conditions. There was no significant interaction between grade and condition, showing consistency in effects across the upper elementary school years. Conclusions These findings could inform the optimal design of digital texts by identifying digital features that do and do not interfere with reading comprehension, with hyperlinks providing word level information interfering and scrolling having no negative impacts.